


What the Flames Brought With Them

by astarsdarkheart



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Anakin attempts to parent, Force-empathy misfire, Gen, accidental trauma sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 12:13:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11989569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astarsdarkheart/pseuds/astarsdarkheart
Summary: The X-wing cockpit feels a lot... tighter than it usually does, and Anakin is a little alarmed.





	What the Flames Brought With Them

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jerseydevious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/gifts).



> This began with 'Luke versus Vader's hellsuit' and ended up here. Make of that what you will.  
> This is nearly a week later than Jersey's birthday, and I apologise. I meant to get something done over the weekend prior to the day, but that was a bank holiday weekend and I work at a coastal coffee shop, so I've been dying on my feet ever since. (The un-British weather really did not help.)

Luke stayed slumped in the X-wing cockpit once the machine had switched off. His heart stuttered with delayed shock, and glancing out of the cockpit seemed to open up a hole beneath the seat.

He drew his cold hand over his face, let it rest covering one eye. The spectral Force-bound inverse image of the jolting pain he’d felt mid-flight still lingered. Not carrying the burning rot of the dark side. Not an identifiable discomfort.

All the ships had made it back. No one was hurt. R2 wasn’t complaining.

What had happened out there in the thick of the fight?

 -

Three TIEs on his tail, Antilles too far away to be of use. If the will of the Force didn’t intervene, this firefight could well be the one where he died, and if the Force hadn’t been able to intervene in _his_ favour, how much hope did Luke have?

So he’d stepped in, _Sidious has taken enough as it is without reaching out from beyond the grave_ put the strategy in Luke’s mind. The manoeuvre the TIE pilots had pincered Luke in was one he’d first perfected. He knew how to evade it.

He remembered watching Luke escape it, once.

 -

Flashes of the fire still ran through his nerves. The cockpit had closed in on him, sealing to his flesh with a sizzling pain that had made him yelp into the comm – his vision clouded over red. His flesh stabbed by shards of metal of the crushed cockpit, the temperature rising to a fever pitch that made his head spin.

Not even Tatooine’s twin suns had been that harsh.

“Skywalker! What’s going on over there?”

Wedge’s baffled call over the comms had snapped him out of it. Eyes blinked open to the light-freckled void. The pursuing TIE fighters had evaporated.

 -

Hearing his name, his mother’s name, shouted into a comm by a voice he didn’t know had startled him enough to release his grip.

But he’d stayed close enough for long enough to hear Luke wheeze as he shook his head, blinking behind the orange visor. Felt the slow relaxation of muscles drawn taut as Luke let himself fill the space in the cockpit again _I let too much of myself into his mind_ but it was too late to tear those burning memories away from his son.

But Luke still sat slumped as if trapped in the stationary fighter.

 -

So hard to focus beyond the cockpit’s array of backlit controls. He knew this machine like the back of his hand, like the hum of his lightsabre.

Shut off from the hangar, from the base beyond that hangar. No one had come up to talk to him yet. Leia was likely still in the control room. The Hutts knew about Han.

A hiss made him lift his head. The cockpit was opening, letting a sliver of dim blue light in. But he’d not pressed the control...

He blinked. Of course he had to get out. The fighter wasn’t his skin.

 -

When he’d still been capable of the innocent grin that his son had retained through years of war and loss _but you see the darkness in his eyes, don’t fool yourself further_ he’d had a grand dream of freeing slaves.

He’d failed in that. Enslaved in Sidious’ machine – his own hands hadn’t touched the cybernetics that had kept him a walking corpse – and others chained by the titanium of his grip.

 _Sidious has taken enough_. Luke descended from his fighter in a daze. _Find your sister, Luke. Find Han._

His son was never to know the fire below the durasteel.

**Author's Note:**

> I gave myself a word count restriction for each section just to prevent myself from getting carried away rambling, and, er... it's certainly a change from my usual habits!  
> I do like Anakin's whole mid-sentence train of thought shifts, even if I still think it'd be awkward in longer pieces. But this is actually pretty short, so er, yes, we're going with that.


End file.
